For more than 15 years the market has been limited for choice when it comes to roster applications suitable to address the shortcomings in the market. The market has not seen rostering and payroll in a single solution. Factors such as price, support and suitability to unique requirements, will mean that Prof1t will be the solution of choice.

Sukema Integrated Solutions, well known in the industry for their CHASE: Operations & Incident Management systems utilized in various markets for more than 11 years, have launched Prof1t. Prof1t is the first of its kind in South Africa, incorporating Roster, Biometric Posting and Payroll in a single application. Kevin Buret, Managing Director of Sukema says, “over many years of working in the Security industry both with security service providers and with clients of security service providers, we have been constantly asked to develop and provide a rostering solution that addresses the weaknesses of existing products and provides an all-in-one solution”. The same applies to the Cleaning, Maintenance, Farming, Retail, and Medical Industries alike, it also applies to Government!

Increased competition in the Security industry have caused margins to shrink in order to be competitive, often regardless of the level of service being rendered; thus the primary focus when developing Prof1t was to identify every single area where margins are not maximized and provide for those. One of the major areas where margins bleed is the requirement to send supervisors to site for roll call. Others include over payment of applicable allowances and overtime.

After much research and planning, Prof1t is a solution designed to address the requirements of organizations that are currently not being met by their existing applications. The entire system has been developed in Microsoft Silverlight as a web enabled application, providing the users with an easy-to-use GUI front-end without the need for software to be deployed on individual computers. The two most important differentiators of Prof1t over other systems are the built-in Payroll system as well as the on-site Biometric Self Posting ability. From a Rostering point of view, the system caters for all permutations of geographical areas, cost centres, clients, sites, posts, shifts, grades, rates, overtime, public holidays, incorporating adhoc and standard patterns, and everything else one would expect from an enterprise rostering and scheduling system.

The greatest challenges that exist in the industry are knowing (in real time) whether the posts are covered, who is covering the post, time of arrival/departure at post, is the client SLA being met, and what spares have been deployed. More often than not, the posting sheet does not match the roster, which has a serious implication to payroll. With most other rostering systems, rosters are updated manually from posting sheets, which is both very time consuming and open to errors and collusion; information is then exported from the roster system at the end of the month and imported into a 3rd party payroll system, and only then does the payroll master start facing all the payroll queries. ProfIT is designed to reduce queries, disputes and costly legal battles.

In order to overcome all of these challenges, Prof1t utilizes a Biometric component which enables personnel to conduct self posting on site; this information is seamlessly relayed in real time to the roster system, proactively prompts for any posting issues on site to be addressed immediately, and updates the roster with the correct posting information. All of this information is directly available to the payroll component, enabling a real time payroll to be viewed or run at any time during the month; anomalies and queries can be addressed immediately, thus limiting payroll queries at the end of the month to an absolute minimum. Although Prof1t has built in real time biometrics, the system allows to function in the conventional, off line manner, so you don’t have to invest millions in biometric hardware before you can use Prof1t.

Control rooms now only have to deal with the exceptions, this has massive operational benefits at the start and end of every shift. The operational electronic OB and incident management module Chase allows for all the operational aspects of the business to be well managed. Prof1t also brings in other components like asset management, e-Recruitment, reference checking and tracking, uniform management and guard monitoring.

The benefit of the accuracy and power of the wage to revenue reports to management is that they have critical information at their fingertips to monitor and influence savings.